Most Tai Nuea people call themselves ', which means 'upper Tai' or 'northern Tai'. Note that this is different from Tai Lue, which is pronounced ' in Tai Nuea. Dehong is a transliteration of the term ', where ' means 'bottom, under, the lower part ', and means 'the Hong River' .
Dialects
Zhou classifies Tai Nuea into the Dehong and Menggeng dialects. Together, they add up to a total of 541,000 speakers.
*Lincang District 临沧地区: Gengma 耿马, Lincang 临沧, Shuangjiang 双江, Cangyuan 沧源, Yongde 永德, Zhenkang 镇康, Yunxian 云县, Fengqing 风庆. A separate traditional script has been developed in Mengding Township 勐定镇, Lincang 临沧, and is different from the one used in the Dehong area — see Zhou.
Ethnologue also recognizes Tai Long of Laos as a separate language. It is spoken by 4,800 people in Luang Prabang Province, Laos.
Phonology
Tai Nuea is a tonal language with a very limited inventory of syllables with no consonant clusters. 16 syllable-initial consonants can be combined with 84 syllable finals and six tones.
Syllables with p, t, k as final consonants can have only one of three tones.
Writing system
The Tai Le script is closely related to other Southeast-Asian writing systems such as the Thai alphabet and is thought to date back to the 14th century. The original Tai Nuea spelling did not generally mark tones and failed to distinguish several vowels. It was reformed to make these distinctions, and diacritics were introduced to mark tones. The resulting writing system was officially introduced in 1956. In 1988, the spelling of tones was reformed; special tone letters were introduced instead of the earlier Latin diacritics. The modern alphabet has a total of 35 letters, including the five tone letters. It is encoded under the name "Tai Le" in the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode at U+1950-U+1974. The Tai Nuea numerals are similar to Myanmar numerals; they are in fact unified with Myanmar's numerals in Unicode despite some glyph variations. The transcription below is given according to the Unicode tables.
Consonants
Vowels and diphthongs
Consonants that are not followed by a vowel letter are pronounced with the inherent vowel . Other vowels are indicated with the following letters:
Letter
Transcription
IPA
Letter
Transcription
IPA
a
i
u
ee
oo
eh
o
ue
e
aue
ai
Diphthongs are formed by combining some vowel letters with the consonant and some vowel letters with ᥭ /.
Tones
In the Thai and Tai Lü writing systems, the tone value in the pronunciation of a written syllable depends on the tone class of the initial consonant, vowel length and syllable structure. In contrast, the Tai Nuea writing system has a very straightforward spelling of tones, with one letter for each tone. Examples in the table show the syllable in different tones, in old and new spellings.
Tai Nuea has official status in some parts of Yunnan, where it is used on signs and in education. Yunnan People's Radio Station broadcasts in Tai Nuea. On the other hand, however, very little printed material is published in Tai Nuea in China. However, many signs of roads and stores in Mangshi are in Tai Nuea. In Thailand, a collection of 108 proverbs was published with translations into Thai and English.
